Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  They were scattering, and he would lose them, these carved wooden horses that meant something he could not remember.

  Their names. Their names were drifting through his dreams, but when he reached out for them, they flitted away from his grasp.

  He had to round them back onto the shelf. If they left him, they would never tell him their names. If he lost them, he would never know why touching them made his heart feel both hollowed out and so heavy his chest could not hold it. He chased them toward the windowsill, across the floorboards, behind the dresser.

  But he could not find them. They were too fast, and too small. By the time he noticed each flash of color, it was gone. One appeared in the air in front of him, wings beating like a hummingbird’s, but he reached out for it, and his hand found nothing.

  Those little horses were so much part of him that losing them emptied him. They were organs that had chosen to leave his body.

  A blue one shook its mane and turned blue violet. It skittered off a shelf and landed on an outstretched hand. That palm stood pale against brown fingers.

  He followed that hand, the wrist and arm, looking for who they belonged to. He found a girl who looked like Estrella but who was made of petals. She had Estrella’s dark hair, loose and unbrushed, but dotted with blue violet. Her body was covered in forget-me-not petals, like she was growing them from her skin. They caught on her eyelashes. They stood in for fingernails. They followed the curves of her breasts.

  Only a little of her showed through. Her lips looked red but unpainted, like she’d bitten them. Her eyes shone brown black. Forget-me-nots covered her body in blue that, on her hip or shoulder or the small of her back, blushed purple.

  She laughed, and it sounded like an echo. She lifted the carved horse to her face like she was talking to it, and the world sank underwater. Through the window, the silhouettes of trees against the dark sky turned to streaks of paint. The floor looked like wood-colored waves.

  But the petals on this girl’s body, those sharp, papery edges, were clear as a bird’s waxed feathers.

  Flickers of forget-me-nots fell past the window, like a rain of blue flames. Those purples and blues softened and brightened. Light from inside caught in their curves. In one minute they looked soft as new snow. The next, hard as slices of a frozen river.

  They were her body, her skin, her name. The girl covered in forget-me-nots spoke. But her voice sounded underwater, or like she was calling him across this valley made of flowers.

  He woke enough to feel her hands, and know that, this time, he was not dreaming her. But he did not wake up enough to open his eyes, or to speak.

  Her touch left the taste of that borraja flower on his tongue, sweet, a little like honey, but also clean as frost. What he imagined it would be like to taste a piece of the sky.

  His palms were hot and damp against hers. The heels of her hands pressed into his, pushing him down against the bed, giving his body enough gravity that he would stay and not dream.

  She did this first with his hands. Then with his shoulders, her palms weighting him down. Then his forehead, the sweat on his hairline cooling in the spaces between her fingers.

  This is where you are, she whispered. Stay. Don’t go off where you’re going.

  Through the blue-gray veil of sleep he understood. She was stopping him from drifting away. She was anchoring him to this bed so his dreams could not draw him up into their current like dust into the air. She was pulling him back from the place where he dreamed about scars appearing on his back, that feeling like he was being cut open with a rope made of embers.

  The petals went dark, one at a time like blown-out candles. Then there was nothing but night sky, and her hands, and these whispered words.

  Stay. A thing she told him to do for no other reason than This is where you are.

  THIRTEEN

  In the morning, Estrella did not find her mother’s shadow behind the rose trellises.

  Her mother found her first, catching her by the hair.

  Her mother’s scent, a combination of the roses and the perfumed powder she sprinkled on the back of her neck, drifted over her. It was a scent that matched her name. Rosa.

  Her mother’s grip on her hair was hard, a few strands caught on her nails and pulling at the roots. But even that slight pain was as familiar as her great-grandmother’s woven blankets. It was a thing that seemed to calm her mother, grasping Estrella’s hair like she was a doll.

  She did it when Tía Azucena went through her closet; she’d held Estrella’s braid while whispering, If she borrows another of my skirts without asking, I’ll grow thorns through all her dresses.

  She did it when Abuela Mimosa would not stop refolding the sheets Estrella’s mother had put away; she clasped her hands on either side of Estrella’s head and whispered through clenched teeth, Que Dios me ayude, if she does it again, I’m hiding them, all of them.

  She did it when everyone was arguing about whether there should be one or two services for Bisabuela Mirasol and Bisabuela Luna, the sunflower and moonflower cousins who’d died within a week of each other. Her mother had come into her room in the middle of the night and whispered, They’re going to argue themselves into their own graves. Then I’ll have to plan everything for them, too! She had said it with such dramatic weariness, collapsing onto the bed in a way Estrella knew was meant to make her laugh.

  But now there was a sharper cut to the way her mother held her hair.

  “If you spend another night in his room,” her mother whispered, “I will wring your neck like a chicken.”

  “I didn’t spend the night in his room,” Estrella said.

  She had heard him through the door. The soft noise held at the back of his throat had been half groan, half whimper, like he was choking on the sound.

  “He was having a nightmare,” she said. “I woke him up.”

  “Don’t,” her mother said. “Don’t go near him at night.”

  “You thought he was a good sign.” Estrella turned her head, her mother keeping a hold on her hair. “You all thought that.”

  Her mother pressed her lips together, a look Estrella had seen on her own face and on her cousins’. Even through generations, she and her family were all such copies of one another. But her mother’s fingers were so much longer than Estrella’s, her face so much thinner, her arms floating with a kind of grace Estrella could only stumble after, that they looked alike more in their expressions than their features. Azalea and Gloria looked more like her mother than she did.

  “That was before I realized he doesn’t sleep,” her mother said.

  “He does so,” Estrella said.

  “He dreams but he doesn’t sleep.”

  “If he dreams, he’s sleeping.”

  “He doesn’t really sleep.” Her mother let go of her hair. “He doesn’t go to that still place where everything is quiet. And that means there’s something that won’t let him sleep. With men, it’s almost always their own guilt.”

  “If you’re so worried about him, why are you letting him stay?” Estrella asked.

  “Because he means something. And we don’t know what he means yet.”

  They didn’t know, but they all had their hopes that it wasn’t just this one boy. They all hoped he meant more than himself. He was the possibility of lost loves found, of legacies broken, of their hearts being built for something other than sorrow. He was the chance that the raw will of La Pradera was stronger than the curse they passed down like antique lace.

  Fel was the glimmer that let them imagine that others might reappear after him. Even the most wary and superstitious among them could not turn their backs to this.

  Especially not Estrella and her cousins. None of them spoke of their own wish that La Pradera might break the curse of their five loves, that it might protect Bay. But Estrella could feel it mirrored between their hearts, fragile and identical.

  “Gloria said we should show him the kindness we would show our brothers if we had any,” Estre
lla said. “So did Abuela Lila. So that’s what I did. I did what I’d do for a brother.”

  It’s what she and her cousins had all done for one another, when they were children who did not understand that it was falling in love, not just any love at all, that could end in vanishing. They had clutched one another, shaking each other out of their nightmares that the way they loved their mothers and grandmothers could make them all disappear.

  Gloria and Dalia had held Azalea while she wailed, wondering if giving her grandmother a birthday present was too much love, and would it make her turn to air? And then, years later, Azalea had stroked her fingers through Calla’s hair and whispered that, no, loving their family would not make it all turn to dust.

  That’s never happened, Azalea whispered, in a gentler voice than Estrella thought she could ever hold on her tongue. Not in a hundred years of being here. Not in a thousand years of being everywhere else we were before here. We keep our mothers and abuelas. We’re stuck with them.

  Under her mother’s gaze, the soft memory iced over.

  “Wait,” Estrella said. “This isn’t about him, is it?”

  Her mother looked away.

  “This is about me,” Estrella said. “You didn’t say you don’t want all of us around him at night. It’s just me, isn’t it?”

  Her mother surveyed the ground at her feet.

  “I think you could bring out the worst in each other,” she said. “He doesn’t sleep, and when you sleep, things happen.”

  “‘Things happen’?” A laugh broke from Estrella’s lips. Her mother wasn’t one for softening the names of things, but even she couldn’t leave bare the truth of starflowers growing from ceilings. Things happen. Things meaning Estrella’s name wrapping around the rafters at midnight. “You named me for those things.”

  Other Nomeolvides girls were christened with flower names, guiding the form their gifts would take. Gloria covered the sunken garden’s walls with morning glories, the leaves brilliant green as the flowers were blue and purple. The cream and soft rust petals of Dalia’s blooms grew wide as dinner plates, and Azalea’s bursts of flowers turned whatever sunrise color she wanted. Even as a baby, Calla got her hands around fistfuls of earth until the bells of lilies sprouted toward the light.

  But Estrella’s mother had instead christened her after the stars.

  “You wanted me to have this name,” Estrella said.

  “And I made a mistake.”

  The word cut in like the slip of a needle.

  Her mother drew her long fingers toward her mouth, covering it. Not with the panic of saying something she did not mean. More like the regret of saying something she had never meant to speak aloud.

  “You know why I did it,” her mother said.

  Of course Estrella knew. Her mother had hoped that a name that was not a flower could free her daughter from the blessings and curses of being a Nomeolvides woman.

  “And look how well it worked,” Estrella said.

  From the stories her grandmother told, Estrella had been only two when she grasped handfuls of dirt and made pink starflowers. In the bath, she had splashed the water until borraja vines choked the drain.

  And now, the starflowers on her bedroom ceiling must have been too much like tulips or Mexican sage, showing up without warning. Those blue petals were too close to the unexpected blooms that condemned girls to being called witches.

  Standing here, with her mother who would not quite look at her, Estrella hated that ceiling of blue stars. And she hated her mother a little for what she’d named her.

  She hated her name the way she’d never hated it before, now that it was hitched to that word. Mistake. It was like a new middle name.

  “Estrella,” her mother said. “I love what you are. And the mistake was mine, not yours.”

  Estrella flinched at the word again, wondering if she’d been mouthing it in a way her mother could see.

  “Abuela warned you,” Estrella said.

  Her grandmother had told her mother; women before her had tried giving their daughters names that were not flowers. Azalea’s great-grandmother had been named Luna and had spent her life drawing night-blooming moonflowers up from sandy earth, half of them as she sleepwalked across La Pradera. Three generations ago, a girl had been christened Maria, only to grow up with a gift for making Castilian roses, the kind la Virgen revealed to Juan Diego. A Nomeolvides woman named Alba had a gift for apricot trees; they flowered on La Pradera for forty years after her death.

  And now Estrella, a girl whose flowers did not keep to where her hands put them. A girl whose mother wanted her to stay far from the boy she’d found in the gardens, because she feared their dreams and nightmares touching.

  “Just tell me something,” Estrella said. “Are you protecting me from him or him from me?”

  “I just don’t want you around him at night,” her mother said. “I worry about whatever is in him calling to something in you. I don’t want his dreams coming off on you. Stay away from boys who don’t sleep.”

  A scream cut through the gardens. It had the far echoing sound of coming across the flower beds and paths. It broke into a sob, and as it broke it took the sky with it, ripping it in half like paper.

  Estrella and her mother followed the sound. They each held hands to their throats to make sure they were not the ones making it.

  They passed under the shadows of cypress trees.

  Two figures showed against the green hillside.

  Reid, taking slow steps back. Dalia, yelling at him, shoving her palms against his shoulders. He looked more startled than angry, like he thought Dalia was something feral he might provoke with any small movement.

  “You did this,” she said, her words shredding into screams. “This happened because you came here. She didn’t want you here.”

  On the back of her tongue, Estrella found the bitter taste of blood and pollen, the taste of death for girls who strayed from La Pradera. The salt and bite would rise to each of their lips if Reid turned them off this land.

  “You did this.” Dalia threw her hands into Reid hard enough that he stumbled back. “This place was protecting her before you came here, and you ruined it.”

  Estrella ran at Dalia. She threw her arms around her cousin from behind, pulling her off Reid. Dalia cried out, but Estrella held on.

  Dalia’s scream collapsed, splintering into sobs. Estrella kept her hold, her grip keeping Dalia from sinking to her knees.

  “What happened?” Estrella asked, grasping her cousin so tightly her mouth was against Dalia’s hair.

  Dalia sobbed harder, each cry rattling through her body so Estrella felt it.

  “What happened?” Estrella asked, raising her voice to cut through Dalia’s.

  Dalia’s words came broken. They rose between sobs a few at a time.

  Estrella caught them and strung them together.

  She’s gone. She’s just gone.

  Dryness spread over Estrella’s tongue. It felt like a stone in her mouth.

  Bay.

  Their love had taken Bay.

  Dalia let a few words break from her lips, like she was surfacing between waves. How Bay had been there and then, in a whirl of wind, had disappeared.

  She had seen it. Dalia had seen it happen.

  Estrella had always thought this part of the curse was pure rumor, the stories about lovers disappearing right in front of them, even vanishing from their hands as they held them. They had all thought they could count on this, that they had been spared the sight of their lovers vanishing.

  Instead, lovers were lost at night, a Nomeolvides woman waking with a gasp from a dream. She rose from the nightmare of losing her love, and, for one half-asleep moment, felt the relief of it having been a dream. Then the next moment came, when the dragging weight of her own heart made her realize it was true.

  Or, as she knelt in the garden, her heart turned and felt as though it was cracking, a stone breaking open and showing the crystal inside, and she knew.


  But Dalia. Dalia had witnessed the moment of losing Bay. She had seen her fading into the air.

  With each string of words, Estrella shut her eyes harder. Even with so few words, Estrella could see it. This thing the Nomeolvides girls had all feared since the day they realized their childhood love had grown with them.

  Bay was dust stripped from the ground. She was rain swept across a valley. She was a veil of sand shimmering gold and then dissolving.

  In one moment she existed for them to touch, and then was nothing.

  The wind threaded between Estrella’s lips.

  Bay could not be gone from here. She was as deeply rooted in La Pradera as the magnolia trees. She cast a shadow as strong as the tallest hedges.

  There was no La Pradera without glimpses of Bay. Marjorie braiding her hair. Bay poking the back of her grandmother’s chair with the button end of her épée, needling her into a hand of baccarat banque. Those satin trousers that made Bay look like a centuries-old portrait but that she wore so well other rich daughters had pairs made for themselves.

  Now Bay had vanished the same as Calla’s father, and Abuela Flor’s lover, and the man who collected maps, and anyone who loved too deeply and stayed too long.

  They had done this. The venom of their own hearts had collected like rain, and they had done this.

  Estrella and Azalea had done it when they fought about who Bay thought was prettier, fraying the ribbons in each other’s hair and leaving bruises on each other’s shins. Azalea writing Bay’s name in places it would lay against her bare skin had done this. Calla falling in love with the smell of yew wood and how close it was to the scent of Bay’s hair had done this.

  Gloria keeping that creased photo at the bottom of her drawer. Dalia swallowing two glasses of sparkling wine at a summer ball and then wrapping Bay’s braid around her fingers and whispering against her neck.

  Estrella thinking of kissing her every time the wind stirred up scent of lily magnolias, like lemons and worn linen. She imagined pressing her lips to Bay’s so lightly the wind would find its way between them.